Skate Story review – the best skateboard game of the decade

Underworld demons and existential nightmares collide in an absurdist skateboarding sim, where you play as a skater demon made of glass. 

2025 has been a surprisingly notable year for skateboarding games. After 15 years in the wilderness, EA’s Skate finally returned, albeit in free-to-play form, while Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 proved to be another fan-pleasing remake of the genre’s peak in the early 2000s. 

If those represent attempts to recapture breezy pleasures from yesteryear, Skate Story takes the skateboarding sim in a deeper, more psychedelic direction. For those with a loose eye on the indie scene, Skate Story was originally announced in 2022 but several delays pushed it back by two years. It now arrives in December, an awkward month, where gems often go unnoticed and arrive too late for Game Of The Year discussions.

If there’s any justice, Skate Story will transcend its fate as an unsung highlight of 2025. More than just being mechanically satisfying, this is a surreal meditation on pursuing a dream and nourishing the soul in a world hellbent on grinding it down. On another superficial level, it’s a nightmare Alice In Wonderland versed in the language of kickflips and ollies. 

To describe the premise is to dive head first into the rabbit hole. You play as a crystalline demon, who is handed a skateboard by the Devil, albeit under a contractual deal: if you can skate to the moon and swallow it, you’ll be set free and return to the living. 

What unfolds is a relatively linear quest through nine layers of the underworld, where you’ll encounter tortured anthropomorphic animals and skeletons who guide you towards each of the seven moons on the menu. Yes, this is still a skateboarding game, but one which is equally propelled by its narrative and abstract, dreamlike visuals. 

Gameplay-wise, Skate Story has two different speeds. There are curated corridor sequences which play like a platformer, where you jump, trick, grind, and speed your way through portals in the pursuit of (in the opening, at least) a mysterious white rabbit. If you crash too harshly into an edge, or rattle through scattered beds of red spikes, the glass protagonist will shatter into smithereens, forcing you to restart the current stage. 

This is interspersed with open sections you can roam at your own pace – largely set in city exteriors within the underworld. In the first area, set within a lyceum where floating philosopher heads are paralysed in endless ponderment, you can chat with the troubled locals, visit a gift shop to customise your board, or take part in minor side activities – like catching air over steaming manholes – to earn ‘soul points’ to spend in the shop. 

As you progress and learn new tricks, later open areas offer more distractions to accrue soul points. Spinning tricks and reverts will cut down illuminated plants, while designated moon pits serve as mini score challenges within a confined area.

There isn’t much incentive to complete all these extras, and they’re never broadcast in checklist form to satisfy completionists, but they do act as a smart, gentle nudge to lose yourself in the skating. In the words of the game itself, you’re pushed to ‘explore, contemplate, reflect’. 

While it isn’t the most complex skating sim out there, Skate Story packs enough mechanical juice where its movement is consistently rewarding. You can pull off simple ollies with the tap of a button, while kickflips and heelflips demand an additional hit of the triggers. More advanced tricks, like pop shove-its and hardflips, require longer button strings before you launch an ollie, while reverts and powerslides are tied to the analogue sticks. 

There are no grab tricks, and few opportunities for oscillating on halfpipes, but Skate Story revels in the art of maintaining forward momentum and slamming down combo strings with its smaller pool of options.

These are best showcased in its equivalent of boss battles at the end of each chapter, where you chip away at towering moons against the clock by performing a variety of tricks in succession, before banking your combo as an ‘attack’ with a button press at the end – usually within a highlighted area which is constantly moving around the field.

The most gratifying, and underutilised, combo challenges are hanging chains you have to snap by executing tricks in a specific sequence without shattering. It’s possible to sail through Skate Story without knowing all of its techniques, as long as you can string a handful of tricks together, but these provide a rare moment where you’re tested on its wider arsenal.

Skate Story offers some challenge in the second half of the seven hour adventure, but it rarely pushes back in any significant way. The vibes take precedence over any showcase of skill, as the skateboarding itself is largely a narrative vessel for the power of creative expression. 

That doesn’t mean it’s a ponderous or mindless experience. In fact, when it’s operating at maximum spectacle – with rushes across starscapes, jumps over fire, particle effects shimmering against your glass exterior, as the thunderous sound design throbs over the speakers – the results are electric. It’s all pulled together by the electropop soundscape by Blood Cultures, which elevates the moon battle crescendos into otherworldly bursts of euphoria. 

With all this abstract talk of eating moons, devilish contracts, and floating philosophers, Skate Story could have easily been buried by pretension. What’s remarkable though is it manages to land its sincere message while relishing in the silliness of its existence. You’ll encounter a creepy frog serving at bagel shops and a frazzled pigeon with severe writer’s block; while an early quest tasks you with cleaning the devil’s laundry, at the mercy of the clothing’s blustering whims. 

Beneath the skateboarding and stylised dystopian visuals, this comedic warmth and irreverent cheekiness is the real soul of Skate Story. There’s even a pointed joke against the use of generative AI on a skateboard you can buy, which might be an easy target in 2025, but in a game about the agonising pursuit of holding onto passions to save the soul, it hits with a deeper relevancy. 

This escalating plunge beneath the underworld’s layers builds towards a climax which is aesthetically mesmerising, mechanically subversive, and emotionally resonant – even as it spirals under abstract monsters and chaotic distortion. Your mileage with the emotional beats may vary, and it is open to some interpretation, but the closing half is an impressive cascade of big swings regardless. 

There are quibbles you can level against Skate Story. The lack of replay value is the biggest, with no option to revisit past areas once you’ve rolled the credits, or any outlet to hone your skills or take on tougher challenges. You could argue this goes against what the game is actually about, but even so, it’s an unfortunate omission for those wanting to dwell in its magnetic vibes for a little longer. 

When taken as a one-and-done experience though, few games reverberate with as much style, wit and originality as Skate Story. Even if you have zero interest in skateboarding as a concept, this is an accessible, sharp, and nourishing tonic for the jaded and lost – and a reminder of what games can achieve when they shoot for the moon and stick the landing.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £17.99
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Developer: Sam Eng
Release Date: 8th December 2025
Age Rating: 12

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